Choices
by Roxie Zephyr Jocelyn
Summary: Pairing: Edogawa Conan x Haibara Ai or Kudo Shinichi x Miyano Shiho. Some choices are willingly made. Some are forced by circumstance. But, all choices change lives...


A/N: Some choices are made unwillingly, others freely decided. But all choices affect lives... As usual, the characters of Detective Conan do not belong to me but to their esteemed creator. ENJOY!

Info:

Kudou Shinichi - Jimmy Kudo

Miyano Shiho - Sherry

Haibara Ai - Anita Hailey

Choices

Both of them were similarly stuck.

For the boy, circumstance was the mischievous matchmaker that had set him up with two men in black. Witnessing a drug deal, he had struck the worst deal in his life: being poisoned by criminals who sought to kill him. But in a stunning twist of fate, he was instead reduced to his seven-year-old self. In a split second, made long by the extreme torture his body was forced to experience, Kudou Shinichi became Edogawa Conan.

For the girl, it was cruel circumstance that had driven her to it, to eat the very poison that she had created. For her, it was suicide. Her sister had been murdered by the very people whom she had trusted her safety to. At her sister's gruesome death, she tried to flee, hunted like a rat. She failed and to her, her only escape was death. But in a savage twist of fate, she was instead reduced to her nine-year-old self. Miyano Shiho closed her eyes but it was Haibara Ai who opened them.

So, the both of them were now stuck, stuck in a never ending cycle of anguish and suffering. For the boy, it was the love he had left crying and anxiously waiting, the justice that he now could not uphold with honour because of the treacherous lies he was forced to spin. For the girl, it was the guilt and shame, that her talent had been the cause of such suffering and the torture of her sister's death haunting her every step. And for both, it was the fangs of very predator that had reduced them to this, a life of endless suffering and pain, who even now still sought to deal the ultimate blow of death.

But, as time passed them by, they soon found that not all was dark. They made new friends, forged new bonds. They made new lives, seeing the world in a different light. They found new joy, renewed innocence.

And most of all, they found each other.

For the boy, absence became the wedge that cracked his perfect world, the wedge that shattered the bond between him and the girl he loved. Her crying had to stop before she was reduced to nothing more than a numbed shell, devoid of all emotion, fueled by bitterness and anguish. He called her and in a swift word, he ended it. It was the first time the coffee blond girl saw the boy cry, sobbing soundlessly, his shaking body threatening to break under the weight of his loss. For the first time, she was not inhibited by hesitance as she reached out to him, to soothe him, to comfort him. When he gave in to her warmth, she saw him, the man behind mystery, the boy behind the paradox.

That was the first time Haibara Ai had truly seen Edogawa Conan.

For the girl, memory became stifling, guilt suffocating. Her life had ended the day she closed her eyes for what she had perceived as the final time. She was a living ghost. It was the first time the boy had noticed her bouts of sudden withdrawal, her sudden silences and the pained empty look that never left her eyes instead staining them in bolder colours as the days passed by. For the first time, he made a complete fool out of himself, his ego never hindering his sincere efforts in making her laugh. And when she finally cracked a smile, it was the brightest and most beautiful star that he had ever seen.

That was the first time Edogawa Conan had truly seen Haibara Ai.

Little tastes had whetted their curiosity and they wanted to know more. Every day became a new adventure, a new page of discovery, a new step in their investigations. They were no longer suffering. They were no longer surviving. They were living life, enjoying it to the fullest. Torture became tolerance but burdens soon became bliss.

So, it was not surprising that when the antidote was discovered, they found themselves similarly stuck again: to eat it or not to eat it, to take back their lives that had been cruelly snatched out of their grasps or to continue the way they had, taking on the life that had been thrust upon them.

The choice was supposed to be easy.

People said that if someone had no past, they had no future.

Kudou Shinichi and Miyano Shiho had a past, a past that Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai did not have. But, Conan and Ai had something that Shinichi and Shiho did not have a new life, free from expectations, empty of reputations.

Shinichi and Miyano never met. Conan and Ai had each other.

So, they chose not to eat the antidote.

For, separately they did not have a past.

But together, they had future.


End file.
